Makoto Kelp is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and a Wilkes Climate Science & Policy Fellow at the University of Utah. Previously he was a NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellow in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University. Makoto graduated with his PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University in 2023 and with his BA in Chemsitry from Reed College in 2016.

My research focuses on hydrologic and geochemical fluxes within Earth's Critical Zone. I use a combination of field, lab, and computational analyses to study groundwater-surface water interactions, stream drying impacts, and water quality.

Dr. Sonam Futi Sherpa is an assistant professor at the School of Environment, Society, and Sustainability at the University of Utah. She is an Earth Scientist specializing in space-borne (radar) satellite remote sensing, image analysis, and signal processing, focusing on extreme events, hydrology, and geo-hazards in the context of a changing environment, and other anthropogenic activities. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Earth, Environment, and Planetary Sciences (DEEPS) and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) at Brown University, where she worked on Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) data for hydrology and proglacial environments. She is also a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) Postdoctoral Fellowships, 2023. Prior to Brown, Sonam earned her Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from the Department of Geosciences, Virginia Tech (VT) where she focused her research on large-scale probabilistic water/flood classification and detection, development and implementation of a multi-temporal 3D algorithm to quantify 21st-century inundation hazards due to sea level rise, and exposure utilizing big data from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Interferometric SAR (InSAR) and machine learning. Additionally, she has also worked on Gravity data (GRACE/FO) to understand the association between changes in glacier mass and climate seasonality in High Mountain Asia using signal processing. At VT, she was NSF’s DRRM (Disaster Risk Resilience and Management) Fellow and IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Climate Sciences Fellow. Sonam has a Master’s in science degree from Arizona State University, School of Sustainability, and M.S. by research in Glaciology degree from Kathmandu University, Nepal. Before coming to the USA, she worked at an Intergovernmental Organization known as the ICIMOD (International Center for Integrated Mountain Development) as a Glaciologist, which worked to empower eight regional member countries of the Hindu Kush Himalaya – including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan.